Anarchy, acts of terror, crimes against the public. To combat it, I’ve got special men: experts from the Army, the police, from every service — these are The Professionals!’

That rousing mission statement, overlaid with the throb of wah-wah guitars and screaming engines, heralded the controversial British action series that was a grittier, tougher answer to U.S. cop duo shows like Starsky And Hutch.

Will Bodie and Ray Doyle were The Professionals — anti-terrorist agents licensed to use ‘any means necessary’.

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All-action: Lewis Collins playing anti-terrorist agent Will Bodie in the Professionals

That included beating suspects to jelly, shooting to kill and driving Ford Capris through plate-glass windows . . . they did their own stunts, too.

Doyle (Martin Shaw) was the sensitive one with a bubble-perm and a conscience. The real hardman of the show was saturnine Bodie, the ex-mercenary played by Lewis Collins, who died in Los Angeles on Wednesday after a five-year battle with cancer.

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Bodie and Doyle were the paramilitary wing of MI5, a maverick unit called CI5 run by George Cowley, played by war movie veteran Gordon Jackson. It was his Glaswegian growl that warned of ‘anarchy’ and ‘acts of terror’, and set the uncompromising tone for the show.

For all their outrageous machismo, the friendship between Bodie and Doyle sometimes verged on camp — and if Collins had been more of a suave Roger Moore figure, The Professionals could have looked as fake as Charlie’s Angels or other U.S. ‘action’ imports.

But his tough-guy persona was no act. Collins was super-fit, a part-time paratrooper from the docks of Birkenhead.

After the show ended, he applied to join the Special Air Service, and passed the initial selection stages for the territorial unit 23 SAS, before senior officers ruled that his celebrity status made him a security risk.

Family: The British actor with his wife Michelle Larrett and their 19-month old son Oliver at their wedding

‘I was just playing myself in The Professionals,’ he admitted. ‘I was a sensitive, shy boy, but I went to a very hard school and you had to learn the ground rules.’ After he was clubbed to the ground in a street fight by a boy wielding a brick, Collins took up martial arts and became a judo brown belt.

His father Bill was a shipwright and amateur musician, who played the piano in local clubs with a band called the Savoy Swingers. Born in 1946, Lewis showed an early love for performing — at two, he won a contest as the Most Beautiful Baby in Liverpool.

Bill bought him a drumkit for £25 and young Lewis was soon playing with the Swingers. But this was the era of Elvis and Buddy Holly, and at 13 he joined a group of older lads to form The Renegades. The ‘beat’ music scene in Liverpool was just beginning. ‘We were all in the same Coke can being shook up, and we knew this thing was going to explode!’ he said.

The Renegades didn’t make the grade, though, and in the early Sixties Lewis decided to be a hairdresser instead.

He started training at the Andre Bernard salon, and soon tasted success: teenage singing sensation Helen Shapiro insisted that only he could do her beehive when she was in the city.

His fellow apprentice, Mike McCartney, had an older brother called Paul who was in a local band. The two hairdressers used to try to write songs on piano and guitar at the McCartney house, and one day in 1962 Mike urged his mate to audition as drummer for his brother and The Beatles, to replace Pete Best.

‘Are you mad?’ Collins retorted. ‘Don’t you realise, in two years I could be earning £42 a week?’

Instead, he drifted from hairdressing into playing bass guitar for one-hit wonders The Mojos, before taking a job as a lorry driver, delivering crisps and lemonade. One afternoon, sitting in a lorry cab with no heater and listening to a play on the radio, he decided to become an actor.

‘When I told my mates back at the depot they all laughed,’ he admitted, ‘it was like saying I wanted to be an astronaut.’

Within a year he was at Lamda, a drama school in Hammersmith, London, where fellow student Patricia Hodge remembers his sheer physical presence. Playing Romeo in a fight scene one day, Collins bolted from the building, apparently stricken with stage fright — and then came racing back, panting and sweating as though he really had just fought off a gang of thugs.

That energy and urgency would leave him frustrated for much of his acting life. He complained bitterly about the endless sitting-around, the inactivity and small-talk that made up much of an actor’s life, especially on film sets.

Stars of the Professionals: Shaw (left to right), Gordon Jackson and Collins on the set of the series which first aired in 1977

Instead of traipsing round auditions, his first job after Lamda was at Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre where he taught drama to deaf-and-dumb children, learning sign language so he could communicate with them.

His first TV part came in the police drama Z Cars in 1974, but his breakthrough was with the three-in-a-bedsit Granada sex comedy, The Cuckoo Waltz, with Diane Keen and David Roper. They were hard-up newlyweds, he was the lodger who constantly tried to seduce his landlady.

Meanwhile, Brian Clemens, principal screenwriter of the quirkily English spy series The Avengers, was trying to cast a more brutal, less eccentric follow-up, something with a sour punch to match the Seventies mood. He hired Martin Shaw and tried him out alongside the golden-haired Anthony Andrews, later famous as Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited — but the chemistry was missing.

Then Clemens remembered a 1976 episode of The New Avengers, where Shaw played opposite a brooding actor who seemed to rub him up the wrong way.

Deadly: During the hit TV show his character was licensed to use 'any means necessary', including beating his suspects to jelly and shooting to kill

On-screen and off, they circled round each other, one snarl away from a punch-up. This was the tension the new show needed.

The actor was Collins. He was called to audition for a bit-part, without realising the producers were sizing him up for a lead role, and was disconcerted by the way they stared at him. Bristling and defensive, he looked ideal, and five days later he was filming the first episode.

Budgets were tight and the actors sometimes had to rest in their cars on location. As their fame grew, they learned to dread being woken by the shout of, ‘Hey, look who it is’, and a crowd of young fans hammering on the car windows.

The Professionals ran for five series and made Collins a star and a national sex symbol. As one wag said: ‘Men want to be him, women want to be patted down by him.’

His character was foul-mouthed and sexist, with an explosive temper. Though only 5ft 11in, he could lift bigger men by the lapels and throw them across the room. When one girlfriend tried to slap him, he dumped her in a horse trough.

The hard punches and dockside language sparked controversy and calls for London Weekend Television to cancel the show.

Career: The British actor also starred in a drama about serial killer Jack the Ripper

One episode was shelved: The Klansman, where Bodie and Doyle fought white supremacists, revealed Bodie apparently had racist sympathies.

After he was stabbed by a black gang member, Bodie was tended in hospital by a voluptuous Caribbean nurse, whose tender ministrations overcame his prejudices. By the end of the episode he was dating her.

In 1982, as The Professionals was ending, Collins auditioned to become the new James Bond. The right man at the wrong time, he would have been perfect for the modern Bond movies, as a tough but damaged 007.

Producer Cubby Broccoli took five seconds to consider Collins, all short fuse and suppressed violence, and decide that he didn’t want him.

Instead, Collins played an SAS captain in a film based on the Iranian embassy siege, Who Dares Wins, and went on to be typecast in shoddy war movies such as Code Name: Wild Geese and Kommando Leopard.

Father: Collins had three sons, Oliver, Elliot and Cameron and was
photographed picking one of his children up from a sports event in Los
Angeles in 2011

He burned off energy with marathon walks for charity, flying and sky-diving: when he and his teacher wife Michelle had the first of their three children, they named him Oliver Sky, because to Collins the sky was the best place in the world.

In despair at doing TV work such as a gameshow version of Cluedo, in which he played Colonel Mustard, Collins moved his family to Los Angeles.

He studied film directing at the University of California, and tried to make his fortune with a computer company surfing the tech explosion.

But though his last TV appearance was in 2002 in The Bill, he never abandoned his acting ambitions. Last summer, ill health forced him to withdraw from 1066, a film based on the Battle of Hastings, in which he was to play the English King Harold’s father, the warlord Godwin, Earl of Wessex.

He might have thought that fans had forgotten him. But the extraordinary outpouring of affection as news of his death spread on social media yesterday proves how fondly he was remembered.

Lewis Collins yearned for action, but he was at his most charismatic when he was motionless — sullen, smouldering, like a blow waiting to fall.

As countless women, and a fair few men, recalled on Twitter yesterday, he was their first crush . . . and you never forget that.

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Lewis Collins was even tougher than his legendary role in The Professionals